


Lest They Be Flatmates in Disguise

by TheOldAquarian



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: AU where everything is the same except Aziraphale doesn't own the bookshop and they never met before, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Bickering, Crowley Has a Pet Snake (Good Omens), Domestic, Excessive Drinking, Explicit Sexual Content, Hijinks & Shenanigans, M/M, Sexual Roleplay, artistic license in herpetology, is it roleplay if you actually are an angel and a demon like you're pretending, oh my god they were roommates, slow burn with an accelerant tossed on midway through
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:00:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24642934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOldAquarian/pseuds/TheOldAquarian
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley, a recently demoted angel and a demon taking a pay cut, have never met. In their scrambles to get an affordable place to live, each of them places an ad online, hoping to find a human flatmate to share expenses. Crowley responds to an ad from an insomniac bon vivant and finds himself living with a stuffy, bossy homebody. Aziraphale writes back to a tidy minimalist and ends up with an obnoxious houseplant hoarder and his six pet snakes.As they each try to conceal their supernatural abilities, flat-sharing turns to fighting, fighting turns to flirting, and flirting turns to...Well, what Aziraphale and Crowley don’t know won’t hurt them, right?
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 241
Kudos: 456
Collections: Good AUmens AU Fest





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the Oh My God They Were Roommates AU! I expect this fic will end up somewhere between 60-100k. Since I'm writing another fic alongside this one, updates will occur about every other week until that one is completed, and will switch to every week after that. I hope you enjoy this!! A huge thanks to my fantastic beta, Chewb, for her ever-careful eye and wonderful encouragement, and my endless gratitude to everyone on discord who was enthusiastic about this fic and helped me brainstorm names and details, you are all fantastic.

Two angels reclined with wings outstretched, hands clasped, smiles predictably beatific. They were so calm and tranquil that they might have been installed in a public square to commemorate a lasting peace. But these were not the sort of angels that got cast in bronze and perched on by pigeons in memorial parks.

These angels were lying in a pool of cooling sweat and other, more viscous liquids, smiling shyly at one another after an hour of enthusiastic sex.

Two pairs of wings billowed in the tiny bedroom. Feathers the color and luster of south sea pearls, and all glossed with dawn. London was quiet, the night’s revelers slept at last and the thrum of business was yet to begin in earnest. The only sounds in the flat were the faint rattling of elderly water pipes and the whispery exchange of kisses.

“Oh Camael, that tickles!” Aziraphale exclaimed, and clutched at the outstretched hand that was lightly stroking at a patch of down on his shoulder. Quarry seized, he turned over the captured hand and placed a slow, gentle kiss upon the greenish veins of the wrist.

Camael gave a soft shiver, and the tip of his wing flicked.

“This was really nice,” Camael said.

“Easier than air with air,” Aziraphale recited dreamily, then sat up a little against the plush headboard. 

He never slept; the upholstery was put in first for style and second for the pleasure of reading while more fully stretched out than his diminutive sofa allowed. If there was a third justification for it, if it was also pleasant to have something to brace one’s back against while certain contortions and exertions took place upon the mattress, well, what a happy accident indeed. 

“If memory serves, you were going to show me the marvels of buttered toast,” Camael said, resting his dark head of magnificent curls in the crook of Aziraphale’s neck. “Have a proper Earth breakfast and all.”

“So I was,” Aziraphale said, “but you’re making it rather difficult to get up.”

“Don't think it's _that_ difficult to get you up,” Camael murmured, and walked his hand over the soft hillock of Aziraphale’s belly to lower region only recently softened.

Aziraphale, laughing, swatted at Camael with a gesture as fond as it was ineffectual. “Why you devil!” he exclaimed brightly.

Camael stiffened and his hand withdrew. 

“Don’t say that, that’s—aw, Aziraphale, I was really willing to have another go there but...” he trailed off.

“Oh I’m so terribly sorry,” Aziraphale said, anguish blooming on his face like a new-struck bruise. “It’s Earth rubbing off on me, you know. They don’t really mean it, here, not like that, it’s a lighthearted sort of jab, an endearment. It’s not at all about— _ the rival company _ .”

He said this all very fast. Aziraphale had always found Camael’s rigid distaste for human slang a trifle ridiculous, but he was anxious not to cause any real pain, and not disinclined to be touched and stroked again if any further caresses were possible.

“It’s alright, Aziraphale, I know you don’t mean anything by it, it’s just—” Camael pulled a face like someone smelling coins from a poorly ventilated piggy bank “—I mean, nobody wants to think of demons while they’re enjoying a nice morning in bed with their lover, do they?”

“Perhaps other demons,” Aziraphale said with faux-pensiveness, trying to lighten the mood. “But I don’t think I’d put money on it.”

Camael laughed, and squeezed Aziraphale’s plump, anxious fingers.

“Let’s have breakfast, I’ve got to see if chocolate croissants are as miraculous as you’ve made them sound.”

Aziraphale smiled, they exchanged one more brief kiss, then each folded his wings and they set about getting showered and dressed. Aziraphale had a tiny flat above Intimate Books, the sort of bookstore that had a curtain in the back of the shop for the customer who wanted an intimate gift to go with their intimate paperback. It was cramped and rickety, the pipes shrilly whistled like a chorus of banshees, and the shower was hardly big enough for one rotund angel even with wings absent. Aziraphale had lived there for more than two hundred years, and he loved it as much as he’d ever loved Heaven’s magnificent gardens and ice cream colored skies.

Still, as he scrubbed his body under the light trickle of lukewarm water from his old showerhead, Aziraphale reflected that perhaps he ought to ask one of the more managerial angels for a raise. 

(There was no such thing as a direct supervisor in Heaven; Aziraphale had asked. “Are we not all supervised by the omniscience of the Almighty?” Gabriel had replied, beaming telegenically. Aziraphale stared a few seconds longer, and Gabriel sighed and said “Just give your quarterly report to Michael, OK?”)

Washed clean and once more encased in multiple layers of tweed, Aziraphale busied himself around the galley kitchen, scavenging in a cupboard for the nice plates and taking the croissants out of the breadbox. Camael, once he had toweled off from his own brief shower, made himself useful retrieving sugar and milk and setting the kettle to boil.

“There we are!” Aziraphale said brightly, setting the croissants on the table and adjusting his vase of moribund daises. “Well, take a bite, tell me what you think. Oh, and I’ve got some leftover frittata in the refrigerator too, lest you think an Earth breakfast is only a heap of sweets.”

Camael picked up a chocolate croissant, examined it like a herpetologist might look at a charming exotic frog, then looked up at Aziraphale

“Last chance to tell me if there’s an embarrassingly wrong way to eat this,” he said.

“The short end is customary for a first bite.”

Camael turned it over once and bit into the flaky crust. His trepidation melted into pleasant surprise, and Aziraphale’s face became smug.

“Hey, that is good, you weren’t wrong,” Camael said through a mouthful of puff pastry.

“Oh I thought you’d like it! You never know with our sort—I can’t get Gabriel to try so much as half a strawberry—but I find this kind of thing rather delightful. Next time I think I’ll get us huckleberry jam for some toast...”

Camael’s face changed almost imperceptibly, and his smile flickered out.

Aziraphale was not a prophet, he’d missed that particular opportunity for professional development, but he was nonetheless rather quick on the proverbial draw.

“Oh what did I say, are you alright?” A line creased between his wheat-colored eyebrows.

Camael sighed, and lowered the half-eaten croissant to his plate. 

“Gosh I really didn’t want to say this now, but I guess I have to.”

Panic spread through Aziraphale’s decorative blood vessels like ice, immobilizing him in his kitchen chair.

“Say what, Cam?”

Camael shut his eyes tightly, then opened them, slow and full of guilt..

“I’ve been called up. Obligatory ascension. Got a promotion, actually, Uriel’s going to induct me into the Order of Elysium.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said. “That’s—how very wonderful.” The chocolate croissant he had bitten into seemed to turn to unpalatable sludge in his mouth.

Camael gave a sharp snort. 

“Yeah, wonderful. I mean, it’s what I’ve been working towards for a thousand years, I’m pretty excited.” He ran a hand through his hair, dark curls slipping through his elegant fingers. Aziraphale felt a sudden surge of possessiveness.

“The thing is, I don’t think I’m going to get that much time off.” Camael chewed his lip. “Things stay pretty busy in the Order, and holidays only accrue after the first decade.”

“You are allowed to request personal time, though,” Aziraphale said. “For the, ah, development of virtue, or whatever the manual says. I forget the exact words, I never bothered to get a copy when it was reissued in the vernacular.” He was starting to ramble.

Camael twitched. 

“I mean, right, I can request it, but I’d feel a bit awkward doing that. I’m not sure spending time with you here on earth is exactly developing virtute, is it?” He smiled in a wry, implicating kind of way.

Aziraphale looked as if he’d been struck. “I thought—well, I mean, I know it’s early on, it’s only the first decade, but I’ve grown rather fond of you…”

“I like you too, Aziraphale, but some opportunities you just don’t pass up, and I have to say, I don’t think nipping down to Earth to hang around eating sweets and shagging the head of the Outreach Department looks all that great for advancement.”

Aziraphale cast his eyes at his plate, determined not to let them get any hotter, wetter, or more unseemly for an angel of the lord. Jesus may have wept, but Aziraphale was pretty sure the host was not supposed to be caught crying over newly-distant boyfriends.

“I understand,” he said. “I mean, I’m sure it’s all very—well, it’s got to be ineffable, hasn’t it? Your very ineffable career advancement.” Even after untold centuries of cultivating Grace, Aziraphale was unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

Camael took a long and shuddering breath.    


“I’m sorry, I hurt you. That was—I didn’t mean it to sound so harsh.”

“No, it’s alright, you’ve behaved impeccably,” Aziraphale said, his voice passing by cool and moving straight on to frosty. “I’m going to get some more tea, would you like a slice of frittata while I’m up?”

“Aziraphale, don’t do your passive-aggressive thing,” Camael pleaded. 

“I’m perfectly fine,” Aziraphale intoned with the most rigid of stiff upper lips yet encountered in the United Kingdom.

They finished the excruciating meal amid a conversation that dead-ended in every avenue they attempted. Finally Camael rose to depart, and the two angels shared one last stiff-armed hug and a pecked kiss, dry as it was momentary.

It was about thirty seconds after Camael had flown off before Aziraphale burst into loud, racking sobs.

Crying was no doubt one of humanity’s cleverest inventions. It seemed only fair, given that one felt emotions physically in a human form, that there should be some kind of release valve, some alchemical transformation of that horrifying interior pain into shuddering ribs and gulps of air and finally nothing but a pounding headache and the thin traces of salt tracks across cheeks.

Aziraphale had been living like a human for so long, he could hardly remember what sorrow had felt like before it was accompanied by tears. So he allowed himself a good hour of wretchedness in the welcoming arms of his tiny sofa, until the seismic sobs had subsided into hiccuping and his eyes ran dry.

Then, with a quick miracle to take the ache out of his face and to divest his shirt and waistcoat of absorbed saline, he sat up, took a deep breath, and halted all outward displays of weepiness. 

Aziraphale was determined not to let things spiral further out of control. He attempted to clear the breakfast things with reasonable efficiency, to set about the day’s miracles with equanimity, and to look the objects in his flat without bursting into a fresh round of sobs.

Really, they might be better off without each other, Aziraphale thought as he polished his silver with unusual vehemence. It wasn’t as if things were entirely perfect. Camael could be stubborn when Aziraphale needed someone to be accommodating, and he was sometimes accommodating when (though he was loathe to admit it) Aziraphale might have benefitted from a bit of stubbornness. Camael was inclined to be serious about things Aziraphale approached with levity and laughed off others Aziraphale treated with utmost sobriety.

Speaking of sobriety, it was wearing out its welcome, and Aziraphale fished out a fine bottle he’d been saving as a five-year anniversary gift and poured the wine directly into his empty teacup, standards be damned.

Anyway, it’s not as if the sex was all that fantastic, he reasoned several minutes and multiple teacups later, ripping the sheets off of his bed. Not that it was bad. It was very nice. Warm. Comfortable. But, as seemed to be the thing with angels, it was all harmony and no syncopation, and Aziraphale thought there must be a more exciting way to make the music of the spheres.

Seven hours later, when his flat was spotless and he was sitting on a bench staring blearily at the ducks of St. James Park gliding across their pond, it occurred to Aziraphale that he felt rather alright. Or at least he felt drunk and distracted enough not to feel awful, which was nearly the same thing.

Did ducks have partners that left them when they got promoted? Presumably not. Ducks didn’t have jobs. Aziraphale giggled at the thought, and lobbed a chunk of stale croissant at the water’s surface.

A phone booth appeared suddenly next to the park bench, cherry red, wildly incongruous, and apparently unobserved by evening passerby. The phone inside was ringing--no, not ringing, somehow it produced the noise of an angelic choir doing their best imitation of a ringing telephone.

“Oh, bother.”

Aziraphale stood up and crossed to the phone booth, teetering a little on the soft grass. Once ensconced in its scarlet interior, he picked up the singing receiver.

“Hello? Aziraphale speaking?”

“Hey there, Aziraphale, it’s Gabriel! How are you doing?”

Aziraphale froze.

Gabriel continued without waiting for a reply. “Heard it’s a great night on Earth. Well, on the night side, that is.”

Aziraphale grabbed for a side of the booth, steadying himself and attempting to rapidly sober up and empty his voice of any potential slurring.

“So, uh, you’re probably wondering why I called, right? Been awhile since we last touched base.”

“Yes, indeed,” Aziraphale said, watching the walls of the phone booth swim as his vision readjusted to clarity. “Erm, what did you want to—” every particle of his divinity revolted against the phrase “—touch base about this time?”

There was a noise like someone tapping on a manila folder, and the bright, metallic punch of a staple. 

“Well, I wish I could say this was one of the fun calls, but I’m afraid I’ve got a bit of a downer today. See, we’ve decided to move ahead with our pilot efficiency program. We’re doing some synergistic restructuring of our direct model that mandates strategically deprioritizing our investments in angelic capital.”

Aziraphale blinked, wondering whether he’d actually sobered up at all.

“Would you mind repeating that?”

“Sure,” Gabriel said. “We’re cutting the budget and we’ve got to decrease your compensation by 30%.”

Aziraphale nearly toppled inside the phone booth.

“Gabriel, are you—is that really true? Oh but I’ve got a flat in London, and it’s terribly expensive, I really don’t think I can afford to live there on two thirds of my current salary…”

“I’m sorry buddy, I did what I could, but—” he chuckled a little “—obviously I can’t circumvent the wishes of the divine, and orders are orders. You’ll still get your previous amount through the next paycheck, but after that we’ve got to scale back.”

“Oh yes, I—I quite understand,” Aziraphale said, politely reassuring someone who had driven a stake through his plans for life for the second time that day. “I’m sure I’ll find—somewhere to live.”

“You are never truly without shelter when you walk in the light of the Lord,” Gabriel said, as though he had just offered Aziraphale a penthouse in Knightsbridge rather than self-righteous pabulum.

“Er, thank you for letting me know.”

“No problem, kiddo. Hey, I’ll call you back with details tomorrow, I’ve got to review some personnel records—you know Uriel picked the newest recruits for the Order of Elysium today, isn’t that cool?”

“Terribly cool,” Aziraphale echoed. He felt like he was trying to breathe through a straw inside a steam room.

“Godspeed, Aziraphale, I’ll email you tonight about your compensation adjustment.”

The line went dead.

Aziraphale put the receiver back and the phone booth evaporated in swishing, golden light.

Perhaps I could find myself a flatmate, he thought. Surely there’s someone who would be delighted to live with an actual angel?

* * *

In a spacious, airy flat in Mayfair, an alarm blared. Across the flat, large and luscious plants began to tremble, as if in fear of an evil awakened.

In fact, Crowley was so sleepy and exhausted that he didn’t wake up at his alarm, and he continued snoring until a naked demon grabbed his shoulder and shook him awake, claws digging into a little more flesh than was strictly necessary.

“M’awake now, you can stop it,” Crowley said, batting away the demon’s claws and keeping his eyes firmly shut while he scrabbled for his sunglasses on the nightstand. His outstretched arm struck something cartilaginous, and another demon abruptly woke up.

“Watch it Crowley, you almost broke my nose!” 

Sunglasses shoved onto his face, Crowley summoned the courage to look at what monstrosities he’d taken to bed the night before, and opened his slitted eyes.

Not too bad—the one who’d shaken him awake was pretty non-horrific by Hell standards. He was moving gingerly up and down looking at the floor, presumably trying to find his own clothes amid the pile of discarded shoes and trousers and hastily tossed pillows that flowed untidily from the bed like moraine from a glacier. 

The other demon seemed to be experiencing intense confusion about how blankets worked. He had a mess of floppy hair and prodigious fangs. Well, several prodigious attributes, Crowley noted as the demon finally freed his lower half from the bedsheets.

“Haven’t spent a night on Earth before,” the demon said when he’d more fully emerged from the linens. “What do you do afterwards, are you supposed to eat breakfast?”

Gosh, probably an intern, Crowley thought with mild disappointment in himself. 

“Look, er—” Crowley cast about for some buried remembrance of exchanging names, but for all the many things exchanged over the course of the night it didn’t surface.

"Wow,” the demon on the bed said, noticing Crowley’s struggle. “Can't believe the 'serpent of Eden' is such a big-shot he can't remember my name." He frowned, and his black wings gave a disgruntled-looking flutter. "I mean  _ you  _ called me and asked if I wanted to spend a night on the surface, I've got to be in your phone, right?"

Crowley glanced down at the bedsheets bunched around the demon's legs. "Er, yeah, you are, it's...er, really more of a description, than a name, that I wrote down."

"Unbelievable," the demon said, shaking his head and reaching over the side of the bed for his discarded shirt.

Crowley turned to the second demon, who was poking curiously at a potted ivy.

"You I really have no idea, you're in my phone as ‘Extra Demon’ and I apologize for that," Crowley said.

The other shrugged. "I have you saved as 'Wears Shoes During Sex,' so.”

Crowley tilted his head and made a movement somewhere between offense and approval. He also gave the comforter a twitch so it completely covered his feet.

“Well, look, guys, I, erm, you can feel free to have a cup of coffee or tea in the kitchen if you want, but you’ve got to clear out after. Sorry I’m a shit host, but I can’t have you lurking around all day, I’ve got to, er, take care of my anaconda and whatnot.”

The standing demon gave Crowley an incredulous look. 

“After all that and you still—?”

“No I’m not talking about my dick, idiot, I’ve got an actual anaconda in the guest bedroom. Her name’s Perdition.”

“Right,” the intern said, stretching and nearly thwacking a grotesquely overpriced lamp with his spiked tail. “You said we could have coffee. How do you make coffee?”

Crowley groaned and threw his head back against the wall.

“Fine, I’ll do it, but I’m taking a shower first, I’m disgusting.”

“Well that’s your fault, innit?” the intern said. “I mean, you were the one who asked if we could—”

“Yeah, OK, shut it,” Crowley snarled, and stomped stiffly off to the master bathroom.

Amid a stunning collection of bromeliads and artfully grown moss, Crowley turned up the water temperature far past scalding (he had overridden the safety limits of the shower system shortly after its installation) all the way up to infernal levels. Just like Hell’s scalded sinners, Crowley let the heat become painful without any expectation of absolution. He felt stupid for the previous night—not because he had any kind of moral objection to a bit of carnal cavorting between two or three or any number of consenting demons, far from it—but because such encounters tended to make him feel a peculiar kind of loneliness the following day, and he still pursued them all the time. They reminded him of what a strange demon he was, spending his endless days up alone on Earth.

Crowley scoured punitively, at his skin and scales, gentling a little at the sore places, the crevices of his body that had been heartily abused and the gashes in surprising spots from that stupid spiked tail. He winced as soapy water ran over an open cut, and wondered for the millionth time what it would be like to have sex with a lover who had no fangs, whose idea of a romantic evening contained more caressing than chaos.

When he emerged from the shower and wrapped himself in a bathrobe he’d stolen from a five-star hotel in Ibiza, Crowley found the two demons, now fully dressed in last night’s clothes, hovering in puzzlement around his kitchen table.

“Budge up,” he said, ejecting the intern demon from the spot in front of the coffee maker and setting to work putting a new filter in.

“I thought you were kidding about all the plants, Crowley, but this is insane. The air is so pure in here I think I’m gonna be sick,” the other demon said.

Crowley grunted incoherently, and rebuffed similar attempts at small talk in more or less polite grumbles. He poured three cups of hot, steaming coffee as dark as Hell itself and the demons sat around the table, sipping silently and seemingly unsure of whether to look at each other. It was about as much conversation as they’d had the previous night, although their mouths had then been occupied with things other than ceramic mugs of Venetian Dark Roast.

After they drained the coffeepot and murmured some indistinct see-you-laters and hey-I’d-probably-do-this-agains, the visiting demons shuffled out the door and into the hazy sunlight of the late afternoon. Crowley picked up the empty mugs, dropped them into the sink with a carelessness that would have shattered non-demonically-reinforced ceramic, and stalked to the sofa, where he flung himself down face first, sunglasses crunching into the bridge of his nose.

He could feel the bites on his neck and the bruises on his thighs making themselves apparent, and wiggled further down into the soft pillows.Crowley reached for the remote blindly, tapping at the cushions before accepting defeat and summoning it into his left hand. 

There was nothing worth watching on the telly, and Crowley flicked through all seven hundred and fourteen of his available channels at crawling speed, letting his post-demon-sex-doldrums unspool slowly and uneventfully. He stopped briefly to watch a commercial for a multi-level marketing company that was selling weight loss tea, trying to remember which of his colleagues had written the ad copy. He paused at a nature show about pythons of the Amazon rainforest. He lingered on an artful horror film about a possessed sushi knife for ten minutes before getting too creeped out.

Four hours later, he was six episodes deep in Monty Don’s  _ Gardener’s World  _ when from the edges of the screen Duke Ligur stepped into view, dressed in overalls and holding a coiled garden hose.

“Crowley, I’ve got a message for you,” Ligur said, and looked around him. “What kind of stupid rubbish are you watching, anyway?”

“Erm, it’s a reality show, very hellish,” Crowley said, suddenly aware that he was still wearing only a stolen bathrobe, which was both very short and very thin. “Got the Demon of the Decade award for that one sitting on my desk, y’know.”

(He did, but it was buried under a bag of plant fertilizer, a hollowed-out packet of crisps, a sentimental novel Crowley would never admit to reading, and a bottle of date palm liquor that he saved to mark special occasions, such as promotions and Thursdays.)

“Ok, whatever you say. Crowley, I have some bad news.” Ligur grinned in obvious and insulting excitement. Crowley tried to sit up a little straighter in his nest of pillows.

“So up in Demonic Resources we’ve been reviewing compensation packages, and there’s one group that’s stuck out as a clear anomaly. Temptations employees have been getting away with murder, Crowley,” Ligur leered.

“Nah, that’s not really our thing, you’re thinking of the Department of Mysterious Unpreventable Incidents and Convenient Disappearances.”

Ligur, who was not very adept at jokes, crossed his arms over his denim-clad chest. “No, I really think we’re compensating them appropriately. It’s your lot that have got to take a cut, Crowley. We’re slashing your salary in half. Also, we will be further garnishing that half for a thousand years, because as it turns out you’ve been lying to us about the exchange rate of demonic dollars and the pound sterling for a millennium.”

“You can’t—I’ve got to—look, I’m, er, I’m really, really rubbish at maths, I tried my best—”

“Shut it Crowley,” Ligur snapped, pointing the garden hose at him from the interior of the television. “You don’t like it, you can file a complaint. I hear the Department of Ingratitude is finally getting around to the ones from the time of the Roman Republic.”

“Anything else you’d like to tell me, Your Gracelessness?” 

Ligur’s face became impossibly smug.    


“Nope, that’s the end of my message. Enjoy your  _ gardening show, _ Crowley.”

He walked out of frame just as Monty began gesticulating at a bed of freshly-planted petunias.

Crowley let himself flop back into a defeated, immodest sprawl.

One thing was certain, there was no way he could possibly keep the Mayfair flat. Crowley was too old and too jaded to believe in things like  _ homes, _ but it had been a kind of sanctuary for him for the better part of a century, dark and stylish and filled with life he privately nurtured and cherished (or screamed at, in the case of the potted ficus).

“Fuck,” he said to the ceiling. “I’ve got to get a flatmate.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaaand we're back! An enormous thank you to the inimitable [darcylindbergh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darcylindbergh/works) for beta reading this chapter!

“I think we’re supposed to take it metaphorically,” Harriet said, helping herself to a second glass of sangria. “She doesn’t  _ actually  _ grow wings at the end, but since she’s free of that asshole — ” she tapped the cover of the book with a gel-manicured finger “ — it’s as if she’s ascended. Or whatever.” Harriet had that particularly American talent of closing all her opinions with ‘whatever’ while maintaining an atmosphere of perfect confidence.

“I thought it was literal,” Newt said. Newt advanced all his opinions in such an apologetic tone that Aziraphale felt almost professionally bound to offer him forgiveness. “I mean magical realism’s really popular nowadays, right?”

“Ooh you’re so  _ knowledgeable _ ,” Marjorie crooned. “I thought we were supposed to take it as she’s having a cracking orgasm. Flight’s always about sex, isn’t it?” She laughed and fished a sangria-soaked orange from the bottom of her glass.

Aziraphale, who had taken many thousands of flights that did not result in sexual climax, simply shook his head and smiled to himself. It was Marjorie’s job to make provocative statements that caused Newt to take refuge in his alcohol, just as it was Harriet’s job to complain about the universal awfulness of the male sex, Arthur’s to make everything they read about the failures of the Tories, and Mary’s to host the group of them in her sitting room and apologize needlessly for the frequent intrusions of her elderly cat.

The Soho Books and Bubbles Literary Club was more or less the extent of Aziraphale’s earthly social circle. He had joined so that he could truthfully say on his progress reports that he was having regular social contact with humans, which was a Key Growth Opportunity identified for him by Gabriel. The club favored contemporary fiction that alternated between maudlin and lurid, and Aziraphale had expected to find it thoroughly irritating, but he’d grown rather fond of the little coterie and his alternate Tuesday evenings. 

As the appointed end came and went and the members stood up to retrieve their shoes and empty their cups, Marjorie turned her eyeshadow-spackled gaze onto Aziraphale.

“You’ve been awfully quiet today. I had a feeling you wouldn’t like this one, but you’ve usually got such  _ interesting _ criticisms. How are you, love? How’s Cam?”

Aziraphale had made the grave mistake of talking with the club about his personal life after half a bottle of Tesco Quality Red Blend. Fortunately, his had not been the most memorable or embarrassing story of that evening; Newt had confessed that he’d started dating his current girlfriend after a fortune cookie predicted they would have sex during a freak thunderstorm.

“Cam and I split up,” Aziraphale said. “He, erm, split up with me,” he added, when he realized he was in the mood for some sympathy.

“Oh  _ no _ , you  _ dear _ thing — Lord, it really is always the ones that seem too good to be true! I wouldn’t have suspected in a thousand years! And you looking so handsome in that darling waistcoat today! He’s a lump and a bloody fool.”

Aziraphale made a vague dismissive noise, even as some slightly-less-than holy part of him preened under the praise and affection.

“It’s always like that, isn’t it?” Marjorie continued. “The ones you think are perfect angels turn out to have a bit of demon in them after all.”

“Oh I think that’s overstating things,” Aziraphale assured her. “But you know, I’ve been alright. I’m, ah, thinking of moving house, actually.”

Marjorie lit up as though some inner incandescence had just been upgraded to LED.

“Ooh, are you now? Staying in London, I hope?”

Aziraphale had entertained brief fantasies of escaping to some Aegean island, but he nodded affirmatively.

“You know, you might have a look at the flats above my shop,” Marjorie went on. “I’ve got a place on the second floor myself, and I know there’s a vacancy up on the third. You could do a lot worse for the money, and Mr. Wensleydale’s never in, doesn’t give a fig about what we all get up to so long as the roof’s still attached.”

She gave a suggestive wink. Aziraphale wasn’t sure whether Marjorie meant to imply that she’d previously tested the limits of landlordly indulgence, or whether she expected Aziraphale might be the roof-detaching sort of tenant, but he replied with a warm smile nevertheless.

“Well I suppose that does sound rather good — is it a studio, then?”

“Oh no, two bedrooms, full kitchen and bath. Not Highclere Castle, mind, but comfortable enough even if you’ve got a flatmate.”

When he got home, Aziraphale shrugged off his coat and let his wings burst forth from the personal nook he maintained in one of the Storage Dimensions (he received 500 litres free, and a 20% discount up to a square kilometre). The feathery tips brushed bookshelves in either direction, but there was enough room to flutter them without knocking anything over, and he gave a few soft wingbeats in the privacy of his dark flat, wondering when he would be able to do so again. 

There looked to be nothing for it; if he wanted to stay in London, and especially if he wanted to continue patronising his favorite cafes and tippling his favorite vintages, he would need a flatmate. He could, it was true, conjure a new dwelling for himself, but that kind of ostentatious miracle tended to prompt Friendly Check-Ins from upstairs, and sometimes resulted in the multiplication of Key Growth Opportunities, or worse, Goals. 

“Can’t be that bad — if I made it across the Atlantic in a pilot berth I can certainly handle sharing a flat with a human ashore,” he reasoned. 

He looked around at his living quarters. Well, the books might be trouble: they were beginning to coalesce in untouched corners and were stacked three deep on the shelves. Then there were the bookbinding supplies, and the bookkeeping supplies, and even a few bookselling supplies he had purchased for the anti-Waterstones he daydreamed about opening some year or other.

Besides the books, Aziraphale’s flat held a castle’s worth of ill-treated tapestries, tins of candies from before the accession of Elizabeth II, fine examples of Rococo furniture and poor examples of personal filing, and a shameful number of cocoa mugs, whose marshmallowy innards had been saved from marauding flies only by the literal grace of God.

The thought crossed Aziraphale’s mind, for the first time in six thousand years, that he might be a bit difficult to live with.

“Oh bloody Hell,” he muttered to himself. 

* * *

In a dark tangle of tropical leaves, sounds of rain plinked softly as a large, hissing snake wound around a limp body.

Crowley paused  _ Rain Sounds for Sleep and Relaxation  _ and batted away the snake’s head in irritation.

“Oi, already fed you, stop interrupting my nap.”

The snake hissed. Crowley hissed back. There was a brief and mutual baring of fangs.

Then Crowley sighed, shimmied into some approximation of a seated position, and stroked the snake’s neck with two careful fingers.

“We might have to move out, Perdie.”

Perdition flicked her tongue interrogatively.

“I don’t  _ want  _ to, but if I miracle our rent or something they’ll know, now. Bastards.” 

Two pairs of snake eyes roamed around the room, taking in the tile floor polished to mirror-like clarity and the lush houseplants traumatized into forest-like fecundity.

It would be simplest to find someone to share this space, rather than moving somewhere else, but everything in Crowley’s contrary soul objected to the idea. The Mayfair flat had been profoundly altered, from its heated floor to its unauthorized skylight, and it was bad enough  _ Hell _ popped up on the television and the smart fridge and the ansaphone. The last thing Crowley wanted was a stupid human bumbling about his private sanctuary nitpicking about the humidity or the total lack of light fixtures.

No, it would be best to choose some new place entirely. He would miss the whirlpool tub and enormous bed inset into the floor, but at least he could terrify his ivies with the prospect of transplantation. That would teach them to have a phosphorous deficiency.

Something cool brushed against Crowley’s ankle, and he looked up to see a rather rotund boa constrictor sliding onto the sofa.

“Hi, Moloch,” he mumbled. “C’mon up.”

Perdition looked displeased at having to share any of the demonic limbs she had commandeered, but Moloch simply flopped in Crowley’s lap and made a few forked flicks.

Crowley groaned. “Tell me I don’t still smell like last night’s idiots.” 

Neither of the snakes met his eyes.

Crowley huffed and pulled out his phone, swiping open to his saved search results on Gumtree. It was not lost on him that the gigantic pythons amiably draped on him (and his other four snakes no doubt snoozing elsewhere) would make acquiring a new living situation a bit complicated. It was one thing to hide several very quiet pets from a landlord, it was quite another to conceal several dozen cumulative meters of snake from one’s flatmate. 

Crowley suspected the sort of person who would voluntarily agree to live with six snakes in their flat was the sort of person who already had numerous scaly pets of their own, and he did not want to witness the scene when Abaddon inevitably gulped down his theoretical flatmate’s bearded dragon. 

The other possibility, of course, was that anyone who would choose to live with his demonic herpetarium was completely raving mad.

“If we end up with some nutter who communes with extraterrestrials and puts death traps in the doorways and reads the  _ Telegraph, _ I’m blaming you lot,” Crowley told Perdition and Moloch.

* * *

Aziraphale’s revelation that he was somewhat untidy was followed by a cavalcade of other revelations, each more shocking and disheartening than the last. By the time he’d walked from one end of his flat to the other, he was ready to give himself up as a job badly done.

If he was only unorganized in his personal effects, that would be damning enough. But as he paced his meager, crowded living quarters, his eyes registered his ridiculous gilded furniture, his takeaway containers growing whole ecosystems, and far too many empty wine bottles with desiccated flowers stuck into them, as if that somehow excused their purchaser. 

It was about as convincing as a carpet drawn over a corpse.

“There’s no help for it,” Aziraphale said miserably, coming to a halt in front of a Nando’s box that was fostering several striking subspecies of lichen. “Truly a disgrace to the heavenly sphere, living like this. I must be the most slovenly, covetous, intemperate angel the Almighty ever suffered to live.” He collapsed into his fluffiest chair and withdrew a cigarette from a case of inlaid silver and sapphires, as if to drive home the point.

Twenty minutes later, his cigarette burned down to the butt, Aziraphale was suffering from something that he had recently learned to classify as “anticipatory anxiety” but still privately ascribed to an improper admixture of his humours and perhaps an overtaxation of nerves. His self-indulgence had gone on quite long enough, and with a shake he felt all the way down to the shafts of his feathers, he stood upright, plunged his cigarette in the ashtray, and set about repenting.

Few things in this world are more conducive to regret and penitence than looking for flatmates on Craigslist, as it turns out.

Aziraphale had heard of Craigslist before his flat search, but he had assumed it was a literary prize for the kind of fiction that invariably bored him. A series of meandering internet searches managed to sink his opinions of it further, even as he signed up for an account. 

“I must be perfectly honest,” Aziraphale muttered to himself. “It wouldn’t do to present myself as some sort of ideal inhabitant. I may be an angel, but my habits are impossibly dissipated.”

Aziraphale, fancying himself some sort of tragic libertine, wrote his Craigslist advert one hunted and pecked key at a time.

* * *

Before running a bath, Crowley had to evict five pots of plants and two snakes from his tub. He was working on a moss garden that did not seem to be flourishing as it ought to, and he’d found that the best mechanism for its continued improvement was the ever-present threat of drowning. Doom and Despair, a milk snake and a smooth snake, respectively, were slithering around the various containers of mosses and did not take kindly to their relocation.

“Ah, don’t start with that,” Crowley said, as Despair began to coil for a peeved strike. “Trust me, this will not be the most painful bite I’ve received in the last twenty-four hours.”

Crowley put the stopper in and let the water run while he went to retrieve his laptop, the bamboo bath caddy he’d painted singularity-black, and an unholy medley of date liquor, pomegranate juice, and crushed ice. Right before assembling these items across and around the tub, he threw a bath bomb into the water.

The trouble with his co-workers, Crowley thought, was they only cared about real bombs, and had no regard for the subtler evils of those submersible spheres. As a black sheen of Galaxy Glitter spread across the water, Crowley wondered again at his own brilliance in popularizing something that was expensive, useless, and prone to coating all surfaces in infuriating, environmentally-unfriendly specks. 

He was also rather fond of the ones that burst out in little stars and smelled like recently-misted roses.

When steam had pervaded the entire room, obscuring the unfortunate mosses and the displaced snakes, Crowley slipped into the ornamented water and shuffled gingerly until his laptop was safely ensconced in the bathtub caddy. He had never plugged it in, but it obligingly turned itself on when jabbed. Crowley did not believe in using electrical cords for his appliances; it ruined the aesthetic.

His half-complete Housing Wanted post was as frustratingly sparse as it had been before. The laptop may have been kept in working order by demonic miracle alone, but there was no magic potent enough to match the strength of authorial indecision.

* * *

Aziraphale, newly determined to be honest, was running into the need for some fabrications. A quick perusal of Craigslist showed that most people posted some elementary biographical details before launching into how they wished to subdivide the household labor and whether they tolerated pets or partners (there was one gentleman who wrote, at considerable and evocative length, about his desire for someone who could fulfill both of those roles). 

_ I work at an independent bookshop _ , Aziraphale laboriously typed, figuring his personal collection made this a fitting choice of fake profession.  _ I am 53, _ he wrote, then glanced at his reflection in a nearby mirror. Despite his self-censure, he was beginning to enjoy playing a role, and the face that greeted him in the glass smiled a little as he lifted a jaunty curl from his forehead.  _ 52 _ , he revised, feeling full of verve.

He tapped from paragraph to paragraph, verging frequently on the confessional as he listed the regrettable qualities that made him nigh unsuitable for indoor living in a spirited fashion.

As he completed his tak, Aziraphale found himself so forthrightly describing his slovenliness and disorder that he began to feel faintly virtuous again. He closed his laptop with a click of his fingers and the satisfied serenity of the newly absolved.

* * *

“Alright, well, can’t be honest about any of this,” Crowley mumbled. “Probably no one lining up to share their flat with a living embodiment of evil, no matter how incredibly attractive.” (A quick perusal of the Missed Connections section would have quickly disabused Crowley of this delusion.)

“Profession, consultant,” he murmured as he tapped at the keys between sips of date cocktail. Crowley had only the loosest idea of what consultants did all day. Presumably, they consulted, or other people consulted them. Still, it seemed like the kind of thing you could tell someone that would obviate other questions, which gave it a distinct advantage of his second choice fake career, which was international secret agent. 

“Age, 42.” Crowley glanced at the closest mirror. He turned his head right, then left, wincing. “Age, 43,” he revised, feeling ancient and irritated.

One date cocktail turned into several, and the glitter had almost settled in the bathtub by the time Crowley finished typing out his advert. His habit of sleeping past noon brushed itself off and became a highly respectable “strong preference for quiet during working hours.” His dozens of plants became a “container garden” and his six snakes were transformed into “several pets.”

Proofreading for any date-liquor-induced typos, Crowley had to laugh.

“Christ. Makes me sound like a fucking  _ angel _ .”

* * *

If he hadn’t witnessed millennia of bloodthirsty battles, centuries of wrongful convictions, and decades of offshore tax havens, Crowley might not have been prepared for the fecund iniquity that seemed to grow from Craigslist like especially territorial nettles.

As it was, in the course of a few days he became addicted to flicking through the most egregious examples. It could, after all, be billable time. He spent an entire evening gleefully catfishing a man who sought an “uninhibited female roommate who is interested in being the financial leader in the household and knows how to kill bedbugs.” 

Really, the tempting was almost too easy, he had to make a game of it. Crowley wanted to see if there was any post title off-putting enough to stop people from messaging one CandyApple_Cutie, whose profile he challenged himself to fill with only true and misspelled statements. Judging by the contents of his inbox, “my slut tubes are open for u if u will plege [sic] ur soul to satan” had completely failed to deter would-be paramours, who were not even turned away by the declaration “my ex told me tequila makes me hiss like a snake so I stabbed him lmao.” 

* * *

Aziraphale was under few illusions about the capacity for sin among the human populace, but Craigslist managed to draw some mildly scandalized tutting from him now and again as he checked Rooms/Share and Housing Wanted.

Mostly, he felt concerned, and he sent some covert blessings to those posters who seemed to be in truly unfortunate circumstances. That was the sort of quiet miracle that Heavenly leadership was keen to inform him was not Thinking Like An Executive, however, so he dispensed them cautiously, quite against the nature of his generous heart.

He was disturbed by the posts of a young lady who was keen to have someone fill up her “fuck tubes.” It was not that declaration which alarmed him — true, Aziraphale was inclined to delicacy and a bit of prudishness in such matters, but he could very much sympathize with the sentiment. He was disturbed because the young lady appeared to be seeking these libidinous escapades under powerful hallucinogens (“staring contest. i haven’t blinked in one weke so you lose. me and the devil used to be mates but we aren’t rlly anymore :( i can wrap my tongue around my wrist and control time”). 

* * *

As profitable and diverting as modern romance was, it wasn’t helping Crowley locate a flatmate. Everyone was too young (he didn’t have the energy), or too inquisitive (the last thing he needed was to end up in a lawsuit or a tabloid) or had pets that looked too edible (python vs pekinese was just unfair).

After idly messaging a few of CandyApple_Cutie’s suitors (“this is literally my vagina right now,” Crowley sent, along with a picture of Abadon’s mouth mid-yawn), he clicked hopelessly on Rooms/Share. Amid the purpled links, something new caught his attention.

“I fear I am hardly suitable for cohabitation” was a title Crowley couldn’t help himself clicking. It opened to not merely a wall of text but an entire lexical edifice.

_ I have found myself in search of a flatmate, but I cannot honestly recommend myself as a boon companion to any orderly creature. Though I have striven all my long life to lead a blameless existence, still as I take account of my domestic surroundings I am filled with horror at the fiend I have become, and pity for the innocent who must dwell near to me. _

It was the funniest post Crowley had ever seen, witty arch-apologia for the poster’s messy room, tendency to stay out all night, frequent carousing, and general vagrancy and dysfunction.

There was little in the way of biography, but the poster was apparently a 52-year-old bookshop worker, and something about the way he phrased his note of recent separation from a partner reassured Crowley. If nothing else, the unknown wit appeared to be neither young nor straight.

Finally, towards the close of the advert, the unknown man had written,

_ I may have been too vague, perhaps, but let me state unequivocally that although my habits are dissolute and unpardonable, I am nothing but careful with the possessions of others, or with their pets _ — _ I am a great lover of all creatures great and small, though I have no pets of my own. _

Crowley clicked ‘reply’ before he’d even finished reading.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well it sure had been awhile! To anyone who read the first chapter and came back to read this one, thank you from the bottom of my dilatory heart. I'll try not to have such a gigantic gulf between updates again. If any of you were also reading Love in Limbo, my other wip, the new chapter for that is partially written and should be released this week. 
> 
> Stay healthy and stay safe out there, friends!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to the magnificent Chewb for beta-reading! Finally, we have our first meeting.

A trinitarian at heart, Aziraphale had divided all potential flatmates into three categories.

The first category was labelled “under no circumstances.” Into this category went anyone under 30, allergic to dust, or obviously attempting to locate a substitute mother, wife, or life coach.

The second category was labelled “through suffering we reach Grace”, and contained all of the people who seemed terribly difficult to live with for one reason or another (visiting small children, elaborate home gyms, bookshelves organized by color) but had failed to outright disqualify themselves. 

The last category contained only one man, and was labelled “please don’t be creepy to this poor human, you ridiculous thing.”

It proved to be challenging.

The post was sparse. It described a consultant in his mid-forties with a preference for modest living, quiet habits, and infrequent use of the kitchen. It was polite, almost deferential. The poster mentioned a small number of pets and assured any potential flatmates his animals would be unheard and unsmelt. Aziraphale was not even sure he could make the same promises about his dust bunnies, some of which had grown large enough to pass for poorly groomed poodles.

At the close of the post, the laconic man wrote  _ if you want to message me on something that isn’t this disaster of a website, you can also dm me on instagram and marvel at my bromeliads. _

Aziraphale learned in quick succession that “DM” had nothing to do with decimeters, that instagram was not a unit of mass or time, and that the unknown poster’s bromeliads were indeed marvellous. They looked like paint strokes, like upset parasols, like tiny Edens (and Aziraphale would know).

The man— _ immoralflorals _ per instagram—also had very nice hands.

They were thin and tapered and supple, bending effortlessly around flower stems and furled leaves and plastic plant misters. They looked refined, gentle. Aziraphale found himself envying the plants they handled, so obviously treated with the utmost kindness. The uniform pallor suggested a life lived indoors, or, perhaps, under cover of darkness.

Aziraphale scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled. He traveled backwards through multiple years of dimly-lit and well-photographed greenery. There were no photographs of the man’s face.

(Those elegant, flexible fingers suggested other things to Aziraphale as well. Some very, very nice things. Things that would make good use of their flexibility and things that could ruin their elegance. Aziraphale pretended he was not thinking about these things.)

Aziraphale flicked to the top of the profile for a name, but there was nothing.

There were no captions, no fiddly little pound symbols (Aziraphale had heard the term “hashtag” before, but he thought it referred to a type of fried food), and the biography was only a rainbow, a black heart, and a snake, mysterious as any carven hieroglyphs upon a long-buried tomb.

Aziraphale looked down at his own hands, which were pink, and plump, and trembling slightly.

A heartfelt pseudonymous note slid, insubstantial and unassuming as divinity itself, into Anthony J. Crowley’s DMs.

Just at that moment, a notification popped up from some anonymized Craigslist address. For a wild moment Aziraphale wondered if it might be the Anthony Crowley he had just messaged, but he shook his head and tried to dispel the thought. There were hundreds of people searching for flatmates, and surely only one Anthony Crowley. He double-clicked.

_ hey that was a really great post errrr you seem super tollarable and maybe you could even p7t up with me lol...anyways heres my cell  _

This message was followed by a number with an unlikely preponderance of sixes. There was no name.

_ in case you want to mfghjkc in person and interview me as an applicsnt to your den of iniquity. I promise im not like a demon in real lifw, haha _

This, Aziraphale supposed, was as good as one could do when one was such a frightful prospect of a flatmate as he. Swallowing his distaste for the obvious carelessness and the invocation of the lowercase “haha,” he began to type a reply.

A new email from the same gibberish address announced itself with a digital ding.

_ bloody h I’m so sorry, this looks like complete nonsense. I swear I know how to spell, I was writing this from the bathtub and my hands were all slippery. _

Then a second later,

_ wow fuck that did not come off right at all...promise I did not mean that in a creepy way I just have a raging addiction to multitasking _

Aziraphale, in spite of himself, was charmed by the inept apologies, and took pity on the floundering emailer.

_ Not to worry, dear fellow  _ (how did humans address each other over electronic mail? best to err on the side of warmth and friendliness, Aziraphale decided) _ , I am sure it was a perfectly innocent ablution. I would certainly be willing to meet you in person—perhaps the British Museum cafe? The court one in the northeast corner? I have business in Bloomsbury tomorrow.  _

Almost immediately, the reply materialized in bold.

_ brilliant, gosh, I think after that introduction I couldn’t complain if you asked me to meet you on the upper deck of a number 10 bus...anytime after noon is great _

_ Right-o, shall we say 12:30? _

_ great, yeah _

_ I’ll be wearing a green velvet waistcoat.  _ Aziraphale thought he ought to look somewhat presentable for a future flatmate, at least.

_ lol...of course you will _

The smile faded from Aziraphale’s cheeks slowly, like a banner being rolled up after a party by a host not quite sure how to fit it back in the box. Of course the man thought him ridiculous.

Aziraphale clicked out of his inbox with a pang of dismay. From his nonexistent Instagram account, a message whooshed onto the screen. _immoralflorals_ _messaged you_ , the app informed.

An unheralded property of the modern smartphone screen is its remarkable ability to refrain from shattering when dropped from desk height by an ethereal being.

_ Hi! aw, thanks for the compliments on my bromeliads, I won’t tell them or their egos will go ballistic. Got a thing around half past noon tomorrow but I can meet you at 1 or any time after _

Aziraphale tried to type “Thank you my dear I am most indebted and the pleasure would be all mine,” but some higher mercy interceded, and he accidentally pressed a button that sent a gigantic thumbs-up.

_ Alright great, I’ll take that as 1 is good. British Museum cafe alright? Northeast corner over by the gift shop? _

Growing further distressed, Aziraphale attempted to punch out “My most fervent apologies for the obtrusive gesture, but yes if you are amenable I can meet you then, in fact it would be rather extraordinarily convenient.” However, he only succeeded in sending a heart.

It sat there on the screen, crimson and pixelated, as enormous and awkward as any unanswered declaration.

_ Er okay then _ , was the response scant dreadful seconds later.

_ I’ll be wearing a long brown coat _ , Aziraphale typed miserably (this time he sent it without accidentally reverting to pictograms). At least if he was going to be a supremely awful conversationalist he was not going to mention the velvet waistcoat he was now obliged to wear to the British Museum and about which he was feeling oddly self-conscious.

_ Ta, see you then. _

Aziraphale slumped into his chair and tried to remember if he’d felt this much despair over the state of communication since the whole Babel debacle. 

* * *

Crowley shut his laptop with a loud clack, sparking a chorus of disgruntled hisses from the nearby snakes. True to the Book of Genesis, he was lying flat on his stomach regretting some of his choices.

At least he had two prospective roommates, A. Fell from the Craigslist ad and whoever  _ Mister_Cinders  _ that messaged him on instagram was. Fell was just as witty in a series of emails as he’d been in the profile, which seemed to bode well.  _ Mister _ _ _ Cinders _ seemed sweet, if not especially effusive. Crowley tried to imagine living with someone who sent heart emojis of their own free will, and shuddered.

He also had a text from Extra Demon, and was tempted to respond. He could have really gone for some decent body heat and a nice blowjob.

Then again, it might be one of his last chances to enjoy the solitude of an empty flat.

_ sorry, got a lot on at the moment. really busy night,  _ Crowley texted, and spent the next hour lying on his bed staring unblinking at Doom and Perdition’s attempts to climb his record player.

He woke up twelve hours later, and thirty minutes into his alarm playlist. (The full playlist was one hour and forty-five minutes, increasing in volume and intensity from faint whale songs through robust brass instruments and beyond. Crowley woke up somewhere in the middle of the opera section. He had only once slept all the way to jet turbines.)

“Fucking heaven,” Crowley yelled into the mattress. Perdition, who had been sleeping on his back, hissed and slithered to the floor.

One snap of his fingers did for Crowley what a very meticulous shower and tooth care regimen would have done for an ordinary person, at least assuming that person knew the proper way to floss fangs. A second snap of his fingers performed the complex alchemy of turning pajamas into street clothes, and a third did the work of about 5 pots of coffee, minus the cardiac arrhythmia. 

Crowley tumbled into the driver’s seat of his impeccably ridiculous car and drove at a speed that should have fatally reorganized his internal organs. He was so distracted he almost parked in a legal space.

“Shut it, you miserable marble git,” Crowley growled at the equestrian statue that stuck its tongue out at him as he bounded across the atrium.

Typical, really. Crowley’d had rotten luck with sculptures ever since he’d beheaded a decorative wooden angel on the front of a church door during an assignment in Milan six hundred years ago. Statues, like non-serpentine animals and traffic enforcement professionals, simply didn’t like him. He would swear on his own blistered soul that Venus de Milo had, against all odds, crossed her arms when he’d first visited the Louvre.

There was a man waiting by the cafe, pink-faced and pale-haired, and wearing a coat that seemed aggressively cozy for the mild September. His clothes were old-fashioned in a way that bypassed out-of-date, sailed by fashionably vintage, and landed somewhere in the great beyond of eccentricity. Crowley would have almost been ready to believe he was some sort of costumed exhibitor for a new installation of Victorian lithographs.

Then the man turned and gave a nervous smile, and Crowley saw the green velvet waistcoat of A. Fell beneath the long brown coat of  _ Mister_Cinders _ .

* * *

Aziraphale looked up when he heard a loud clicking, which he deduced a moment later was a pair of extremely pointed black boots.They belonged to a thin man with longish hair in an unlikely red who looked to Aziraphale like an aging Art Nouveau illustration. He was wearing sunglasses, though it was not exceptionally bright indoors, and quite overcast outside.

“Oi!” the stranger shouted a moment later, and walked over with a steadiness that suggested recent disembarkation from a long sea voyage. As he approached, Aziraphale could smell the violent scent of truly awful cologne. Then he caught sight of the hand that waved to him, and felt suddenly faint.

It was one of  _ those _ hands, wearing  _ that _ ring on the thumb: a silver snake coiled protectively around the digit, its head pointed to the knuckle. 

“No it can’t be—really what  _ are  _ the chances?” Aziraphale breathed.

“What?” the man asked, reaching him.

“You’re  _ immoralflorals _ , I’m due to meet you in half an hour, you’re the same—” Aziraphale realized at once he sounded far too interested, “—er, I recognized your ring.” No, that was even worse, he’d better revise that. “My, ah, brother has one just like it.”

Technically, it wasn’t a lie, if you took all the angels in Heaven to be Aziraphale’s brothers (which was doctrinally, if not genetically, sound) and ‘just like it’ to be a vague memory that Michael had a ring which was also made of silver.

“What is your real name, then? Is it Anthony Crowley or am I speaking to Mr. Florals…?”

“Anthony  _ J. _ Crowley, yeah. I just, er, most people call me Crowley. Not really a first name bloke.”

“I’m not much for last names myself,” Aziraphale said. “I am Aziraphale Fell, and I’m afraid I  _ am  _ going to insist you use the full Christian name if we are to cohabit without incident.” He smiled to indicate his own harmlessness, though he wasn’t entirely joking.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley was so incredulous his eyebrows looped all the way over his sunglasses in surprise. “Well  _ that’s _ certainly a mouthful.”

Aziraphale felt as though he’d been rudely jabbed, and said, icily, “Rather.”

“Hang on a second, so you’re the one who messaged my instagram  _ and  _ the one who wrote that absolutely brilliant advert? You’re hysterical, I hope you know that.” 

The last of the bubbling brightness that had been building in Aziraphale died away at that.  _ Hysterical. _ He could sense the sour, sinking feeling that he was being mocked. Strangely, it felt an awful lot like giving a Quarter Century Earth Update to angelic management.

* * *

That name,  _ Aziraphale _ , echoed uselessly around Crowley’s head. Why was it familiar? Probably nothing. Perhaps he’d known some rubbish Aziraphales back in the antediluvian days. This Aziraphale was sitting down at a table and pulling out a menu card like he was decrypting the Rosetta Stone. Crowley had the strangest sensation when he looked at him, like he was staring into a nasty fluorescent light, a brightness that made the part of him which was still a snake long for the safety of shadow.

Aziraphale pulled out a chair. Crowley assumed he was going to sit in it, but then he pulled out another and sat down in that one instead. Aziraphale poured each of them a glass of water from the carafe, then produced a handkerchief—an actual honest-to-Satan  _ handkerchief— _ and wiped off the menus. This done, he straightened his own silverware so that it formed a perfect 90 degrees with the pattern on his plate.

Crowley, whose sensibilities were offended by politeness, solicitude, handkerchiefs, and right angles everywhere, sensed an oncoming disaster.

* * *

Crowley climbed into his chair with a movement that looked less like a person sitting down and more like a bridge collapsing in slow motion. Aziraphale always prided himself on his tremendous empathy for the clumsy (goodness knew how often he’d spilled tea all over his desk in Heaven), so he was careful to look at the neighboring table’s cappuccinos while Crowley was corralling all of his limbs into a semblance of decorum.

Aziraphale cleared his throat. 

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I rather fancy sandwiches, though I could also go for a muffin and a cup of soup.” He looked up.

Crowley was not looking at the menu. He was staring at Aziraphale through his two enormous black lenses. There was no light that passed through them whatsoever.

“M’not having anything,” he said, without moving much of his face.

“You’re not—but we—we came here for  _ lunch! _ ” Aziraphale exclaimed, spluttering a little. “Did you have a large breakfast?” he accused before he could stop himself.

Crowley gave a short, self-amused. “Nope.”

Aziraphale must have been peering into the void of Crowley’s sunglasses a little too much, because Crowley tapped the rim and said, “it’s, ah, medical. Nasty fall when I was young and stupid.”

(He did not explain the looping snake inked on the side of his face, which, though rather tasteful for a facial tattoo, Aziraphale likewise assumed was an acquisition from Crowley’s younger, stupider days.)

“Forgive me, I’m so sorry for staring,” Aziraphale said perfunctorily. “Perfectly awful of me.” 

“Nah, you weren’t staring. You know, I can see fine,” Crowley added. “In case you thought you could get away leaving dirty dishes in the sink without my notice.”

Aziraphale laughed genuinely for the first time, and felt a tiny spark of the extinguished hope flare to life.

A waiter appeared and Aziraphale ordered a ham and cheese croissant and the fancy coffee that he knew came with a small plate of biscuits.

“So, Anthony—sorry,  _ Crowley— _ you said you’re a consultant, how is business going?”

Crowley’s mouth opened slowly and he made several unintelligible noises, like words that had died and been inexpertly reanimated.

Aziraphale tilted his head. “I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch that.”

“Er, it’s fine. Super, actually. I mean obviously not  _ that  _ super because I’m looking for a flatmate but y’know. Lots of consulting. Got a corner office, I’m pretty, erm, important. Hours vary so I’ll probably be in and out a lot.”

After delivering this stammered reply, Crowley leaned back and propped his pointed boots on an empty chair, a caricature of relaxation.

Aziraphale despaired at people who put their dirty shoes on unoccupied chairs like he despaired at sea level rise and the adoption of mass-market paperback formatting.

“Wonderful,” he said coldly to the offending boots. “I’ll likely be in the flat most days until the evening.”

The waiter came back with Aziraphale’s croissant sandwich and the coffee with biscuits. Crowley ran his fork around his empty plate in a way that made a horrific ringing sound.

“You sell used books, right?” he asked. Aziraphale thought he could detect a sneer in the question, slipped in right at the end.

“My dear, could you stop abusing the china? That’s a horrid noise.” 

Crowley dropped the fork and raised his hands as if to indicate he was no longer armed with flatware.

“Sorry, I didn’t notice.”

It was a lie, accompanied by an insincere and unfortunately handsome smile. Aziraphale decided not to notice either.

“Anyway, yes, I work at a bookshop, er, I have a late shift.”

Lying was uncomfortable, and Aziraphale was awful at it. Even worse, Crowley seemed to pick up on the lie but was unwilling to grant Aziraphale the same pretend obliviousness Aziraphale had just extended him. It should not be possible for a man in sunglasses to inflict an unblinking stare, but somehow Crowley was managing it.

“And you’ve got quite a few books yourself, right? Looked like it in your advert.”

“Yes, I’m afraid at heart I am a book-buyer rather than a bookseller. Do you have many shelves as well?” The thought came to Aziraphale’s mind that Crowley might be the e-book type.

“Nah, I don’t read,” Crowley said, reaching over and swiping the raspberry jam from one of Aziraphale’s jam thumbprints.

Something shifted in Aziraphale’s mind. Crowley’s refusal to order seemed less like happenstance and more like unfriendliness, and even his clothes seemed to switch from stylishness to snobbery.

“Used to have a lot of records, but I’ve digitized all that junk,” Crowley continued. “Don’t like having loads of stuff.”

Aziraphale thought of his golden phonograph, of pleasurable warm evenings surrounded by music, by his treasured collection. He looked at his hollowed-out jam thumbprint.

“I see. Well, I suppose it would be mostly my things cluttering up the place,” he said softly.

“Ah, I dunno, I’ve got some big houseplants. You use the kitchen much?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale lied. He felt a sudden strong reluctance to cede any theoretical room to his increasingly theoretical flatmate.

“Great, like I said in the post, I never do,” Crowley said. “The job caters a lot, and I ah, don’t eat much.” He looked at Aziraphale and gave a brief bark of laughter. 

Aziraphale could place what it was now, that odd sensation that was not quite a smell beneath Crowley’s aggressive cologne, that was not quite a sound in the echoes of his voice. It was the sense Aziraphale got when there was Evil around. He’d first experienced it shortly after the Fall of Man, when he’d chased the serpent out of Eden after its celebratory slithering got on the very last of his nerves. It was strange to feel it again now, in the genteel calm of the museum cafe not a hundred feet from tourists buying paperweights that looked like the stele bearing Hammurabi’s code. 

It couldn’t be coming from Crowley himself. That was ridiculous: for all the man was rude and smarmy and generally unpleasant, it was clear he was perfectly harmless. With a flash of horror, Aziraphale realized it must be himself and his own unreasonable spite, that he hated stupid Anthony J. Crowley so much his angelic senses were going haywire. 

He almost began to feel sorry for Crowley.

* * *

It dawned on Crowley what he felt when he looked at Aziraphale—that feeling like moderate allergies or a kind of full-body version of too much pineapple upon the tongue. It was the strange, prickly apprehension he had when he was exposed to pure Good. The first time he’d felt it was all the way back in Eden, when he’d been slithering around in panic and one of the angels guarding the gates shooed him away. He couldn’t remember what the angel looked like, not from his vantage point on the garden floor, only that it had been impossibly bright and sort of prissy-sounding. Crowley imagined that covered about ninety-nine percent of angels at the least; fortunately he hadn’t run into too many since then.

Aziraphale seemed like a nice man, probably even nice enough that Crowley would feel a bit bad about ruining his life, but there was no way he was the source. You didn’t pick up that kind of thing from humans. Humans were not immutable, they could always change for the worse, or the better. It had to be coming from Crowley, a misinterpretation of that heady, annoying feeling of— _ nope, that was too ridiculous even to think _ —genuine fondness for another person and not-insignificant attraction. 

There was never a good time to develop a crush on a human (Crowley could barely remember the last time—maybe three hundred years ago? When had frock coats been in style?), especially a daft one that pulled out chairs for other people and used the heart emoji and was interviewing to be a potential flatmate.

Despite that, it was clear the feeling wasn’t going away. Crowley decided to make an unsubtle exit ploy.

“Hey, you want to see the pets I’ve got?” he asked. Nothing like a twelve-foot snake to drive away an inconveniently attractive acquaintance.

Something twitched in Aziraphale’s face. Crowley would recognize the flicker of temptation anywhere.

“Oh, all right, do you have a photograph?”

“Got a phone,” Crowley murmured, swiping up and drawing an occult sigil to unlock it.

He found a picture of Perdition coiled around his coffee table that was suitably frightening.

“There she is. Name’s Perdie, she’s about fifteen years old. Never learned not to sit on the furniture.”

Aziraphale’s enormous eyes softened, and he made a face like he had just lifted the lid from a box of helpless squealing puppies with tiny bows around their necks.

“Oh she’s absolutely darling! What a beautiful creature. You know I am extremely fond of animals. How lovely, oh you must have taken such good care of her, she looks magnificent.”

Uh-oh.

“Oh and look how her tail is curled around the leg of the table, it’s just adorable!” Aziraphale smiled with genuine delight. “And here I was thinking you had a little terrier or maybe a calico cat.”

This was not good. Crowley felt himself smiling back as something warm and sticky settled in his chest. 

“Nah, I’ve got a couple of snakes. Got an affinity for them, I guess.”

Aziraphale beamed. 

“The first time I encountered a snake I’m afraid to say I didn’t care for them at all, but they really are such lovely creatures.” His eyes were very large and very blue. Crowley was finding it difficult not to do something breathtakingly stupid.

“Come live with me,” he said to Aziraphale.

“I—what?”

“I mean, let’s do this. Let’s be flatmates.”

“Oh I don’t know about that,” Aziraphale said, becoming distant and frosty again. “You seem very, er, engaging, Crowley, but I fear we are quite different people, with habits that would drive one another mad.”

“I’m sorry I stole your raspberry jam, that was a bit shit. Look—we’ll hardly be around each other, really. I mean, up to you, I just think if you see a picture of a bloody great constrictor on a coffee table and absolutely melt, that’s about as good an omen as you’re likely to get that we’re the right sorts to  _ not  _ drive each other mad.” He hoped it sounded like a savvy deal and not a raving rant, or worse, a confession.

“Omen?” Aziraphale asked. “I wouldn’t have thought you were the superstitious type.” He paused for a moment, pressed all of the croissant crumbs with his thumb and nibbled them one by one. An uncomfortable half-minute ticked by.

“Well, who am I to object to some kind of divine intervention?” Aziraphale said at last, smiling as though he’d made some kind of joke.

“Don’t know if I’d call it that,” Crowley muttered, as they shook hands over the table.

* * *

Aziraphale couldn’t say exactly what it was that made him agree to go flat-hunting with Crowley. He certainly hadn’t anticipated a twitchy, obnoxious creep who kept an anaconda to be his future flatmate. But he felt disturbed by his own dislike of Crowley, or whatever aversion made him feel as though he was in the presence of something diabolical. 

Perhaps it was pride, deadliest of sins, that made Aziraphale agree to live with him. Perhaps he was unwilling to bow to his own visceral animosity, determined to find the good in Anthony J. Crowley and to affirm his own kindness.

As he left the British Museum, Aziraphale saw the Lion of Knidos shake its heavy stone head in apparent dismay.


End file.
